Archives for January 2007

The Rifftides staff is awash in deadline assignments that yield even more than this blog pays, so we’re bound to keep at them. When the waters subside, my plan is to begin surveying some of the CDs that have come in on the tide recently (is this aquarian metaphor getting out hand?). For now, please roam the archives (see the right-hand column) for items of interest that you may have missed.
Oh, yes; the headline up there is “Kenny Barron.” He is on my mind because I’m going to introduce him this weekend in his solo concert on the nine-foot Steinway at The Seasons. For an idea why I am anticipating the prospect of hearing Kenny live after too long a dry spell, check out this video clip of his solo on “I Can’t Get Started.” The band is the Stan Getz quartet with Barron, bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Victor Lewis in Vienna, probably in 1989. Getz smiles (!) and prompts Barron to take two bows. No wonder. The video quality is blurry. The sound is not. You’ll be glad.

Mark Stryker, the jazz columnist of the Detroit Free Press, read the Clifford Brown posting and wrote:

Given Soupy’s Detroit connections, I once wrote a story about Soupy and the Clifford tape not long after it first surfaced in 1996. There’s no link but I’ve copied some details below, as well as some of Soupy’s other memories.

Comedian Soupy Sales, a television pioneer, began rooting around his Beverly Hills garage in 1994 at the request of a documentary producer at the A&E network. Eventually, he exhumed a film canister containing a handful of episodes of “Soupy’s On,” his five-day-a-week, late-night variety show, which aired live from 1953 through ’59 on WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) in Detroit.There, nestled among the pie-in-the-face comedian’s collection of goofy characters like Wyatt Burp and Ernest Hemingbone and Charles Vichysoisse, was five minutes of priceless jazz history — the only surviving film of Clifford Brown, one of the greatest trumpeters in jazz.

The film features Brown — or “Brownie” as he was known to friends and fans — roaring through the Eubie Blake ballad “Memories of You” and George Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good” in early 1956, just months before he was killed in an auto accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the age of 25. Brown segues between the two tunes without a break, and the segment concludes with a brief interview with Sales. “When we’d come into Detroit, we’d play the Rouge Lounge at that time, but we’d always do maybe five minutes or so to promote the gig on Soupy’s show,” says drummer Max Roach, who, with Brown, led an influential quintet from 1954-56 and also played on Charlie Parker’s seminal bebop records in the ’40s.”In this particular instance, Clifford just ran down and did it with the rhythm section that was on Soupy’s show. But it’s an unusual tape in that all you see is Clifford from different angles. You can see the way Clifford’s chops and embouchure are and the way he used his right hand; it’s a fabulous study in the way Clifford dealt with the the trumpet. It’s just unbelievable.”

As word of Sales’ Indiana Jones-like discovery spreads through the jazz community — and videotape copies of the Brown film are traded like talismans — speculation has become rampant among musicians and fans: What other treasures lie buried in Soupy’s archives? The answer, tragically, is almost nothing, even though Soupy’s On featured the most remarkable collection of jazz talent in television before or since.A short list of the jazz giants who performed on the program includes: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Chet Baker, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Illinois Jacquet, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines and Thelonious Monk. Miles Davis, who lived in Detroit for five months in 1953-54, was a regular, as were Detroit-bred stars such as Pepper Adams, Tommy Flanagan and Yusef Lateef. But these were the days before videotape, and unless a program was shot on film or saved via a kinescope — a film of the TV screen — it simply vanished. That was the fate of “Soupy’s On,” except for a few episodes that Sales had a friend film in order to document his comedy characters. It’s serendipity that Brown happened to be on a program that survived. “Don’t forget, you’re talking about 1955, and nobody ever thought about taping stuff like that in those days,” says Sales, 70, speaking from a hotel in Huntington, W.Va., where he was performing.

Other than Brown, the only jazz musicians captured on Sales’ private films are pianists Eddie Heywood Jr. and Erroll Garner; Heywood is a minor figure, and film of Garner is plentiful. Even the shows near the end that were actually videotaped were all erased in the ’60s by the station in order to recycle tape.

Sales was the biggest TV star in Detroit in the ’50s, making a reported $100,000 a year by 1958. His noontime show for kids, “12 O’Clock Comics,” was so highly rated that he replaced “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” on the ABC network for eight weeks during the summer of 1955.”Soupy’s On” ran from 11 to 11:15 p.m. in the early days, growing eventually to a full 30 minutes. Each show featured sketch comedy, talk and a healthy dose of jazz. The show’s theme song was Charlie Parker’s bebop anthem “Yardbird Suite.”Detroit’s thriving club scene ensured a steady stream of top jazz performers, who Sales says were paid scale — $25 — to appear on the show. There was never any rehearsal. A soloist would choose a standard and a key that everyone was comfortable with and just play, says Jack Brokensha, who played drums and vibes with the Australian Jazz Quintet in the mid-‘ 50s and left the road to become a staff musician at WXYZ during the final year of “Soupy’s On.””It was live TV, and you only got two or three minutes per tune. And I remember one night Thelonious Monk played ‘Round Midnight’ and you couldn’t stop him, and we had to roll the credits over him,” says Brokensha of Bloomfield Hills.

Though not a musician, Sales was an aficionado who hung out in clubs and knew jazz like an insider. The show’s original producer and director, Peter Strand, remembers that Sales’ knowledge of the music led to the kind of incisive interviews you never see today.”It was not idle chat. Soupy knew why they wrote what they wrote, so they opened up and could be themselves,” says Strand, now of Glenview, Ill.Sales says he knew at the time that the nightly parade of jazz stars was special. “That always occurs to people who star in their own shows . . . and it’s only afterwards that everybody else says, ‘We should’ve saved that.’

Soupy Sales remembers a few of the jazz greats who appeared on “Soupy’s On.

“Ella Fitzgerald, vocalist: “Ella was wonderful. She was just the sweetest lady who ever lived. She was like sugarcoated; you just wanted to hug and kiss her. Anything you wanted she did.
“Duke Ellington, bandleader: “With Duke, you were in the presence of greatness, you know. He sat down and played “Satin Doll” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

Chet Baker, trumpet: “There you’re looking at a potential big movie star. He was like another James Dean had he kept himself straight. He had such a beautiful face, and he was really a nice guy, a great personality, and he could sing. It was a shame to watch a man destroy himself in front of your very eyes.”

Billie Holiday, vocalist: “Some people had a concern when we had her on. They said, ‘You gonna let that junkie on?’ And I said: ‘Listen, I have her on ’cause she’s a great singer. I don’t care what she does in her private life.’ She came on and sung her ass off. . . . She sang ‘Fine and Mellow’ and ‘Lover Man.’ I’ll never forget that.”

Stan Getz, tenor sax: “He was so whacked out. He said, ‘Just let me know when you want me to go up there.’ And he’d play, and we could not get his attention ’cause he played with his eyes closed. He got through and said, ‘How was it?’ And I said, ‘We went off the air five minutes ago.’ “

Milt Jackson, vibes: “He once was doing the show, and he pulled out a glasses case, and a joint fell on the floor, and I stepped on it. Afterwards, I said, ‘You look underneath my shoe, you’ll see something you dropped.’ He said, ‘Oh, thank you so very much.’

Thanks for keeping the blog — it’s become part of my everyday routine.

Mark Stryker

For years, I have heard reports that when the great trumpeter Clfford Brown appeared on a Detroit television program hosted by the comedian Soupy Sales, his performance was recorded. A kinescope has surfaced to confirm the reports. The guest shot with Sales produced what seems to be the only film or videotape of Brown playing. A couple of untypical fluffs at the beginning of “Oh, Lady Be Good” indicate that he had no time to warm up, but once Brownie got underway, his technique, imagination, power and spacious tone were in full operation. Minimal information accompanying the YouTube clip dates the appearance as early 1956, putting it within six months of Brown’s death in a June, 1956 auto crash. What an astonishing musician he was.
A brief conversation with Sales gives us an inkling of Brown’s gentleness and warmth. Sales and his set designer must have been two of the few people in the world to refer to Brown as “Cliff.”
A fair number of performances by Bud Powell exists on video, filmed in French and Scandinavian clubs in 1959, ’62 and ’63. The DVD called Bud Powell in Europe contains most, if not all of them. During this period, the seminal bebop pianist was enjoying relatively good health and stability following years of mental disequilibrium. As I wrote in the essay that accompanied a Powell CD,

…through the 1940s and much of the early ’50s, he performed at a level of energy and inspiration no other pianist could match. Occasionally through the years until his death in 1966, the old incandescence flashed briefly. Even when the uncanny rush of his creative ideas was interrupted and the flame of his almost superhuman energy had lowered, Powell’s sound…the way he touched the piano, the way he voiced chords..was intact.

Inevitably, several pieces lifted from the Powell DVD have popped up on YouTube in various states of video and audio quality, from barely adequate to okay. Powell was in good shape, if not at his peak of genius. You will hear in “Anthropology” and, particularly, in “Get Happy,” the harmonic voicings that inspired pianists in the forties and inform chord theory in jazz to this day. And you will hear the nearly uninterrupted flow of creativity that characterized his melodic lines. He is accompanied by Kenny Clarke, the father of bebop drumming, and bassist Pierre Michelot. On “Anthropology,” tenor saxophonist Lucky Thompson joins them. It may not be Bud in his prime, but here’s the line that ended that liner note essay:

It is always instructive to study even the lesser works of the masters.

Barry Finnerty, a guitarist who worked with Michael Brecker in the Brecker Brothers band of the late 1970s, has posted a lengthy reminiscence about his friend. It includes this paragraph:

He used to take his humility to extremes sometimes… he would complain to me that he hated his own playing, was tired of all his licks, that he felt he was doing nothing but endlessly repeating himself on every solo he took. I couldn’t sympathize with him too much on that one. I’d tell him, “I should be able to repeat myself like that!” Besides, I would console him, he was the only one that could tell! There was one lick he used to play a lot that actually became kind of a private joke between us. It was a lightning-fast pentatonic scale riff in groups of 6, going up chromatically… I figured it out and started to play it in my solos, giving him a wink out of the corner of my eye, and then he would do the same to me when it was his turn. Once he came into a club where I was playing, and I spotted him in the back…and when it came time for my solo, I cranked up the distortion and looked him right in the eye as I blasted out the lick for the first thing I played! It cracked him up.

To read all of Finnerty’s essay, which includes the little-known story of Brecker’s redemption from drugs, go to his web page.

They’re asking for ludicrous, ridiculous kinds of tunes. It could be “Johnson Rag,” or “Don’t you have any Russ Morgan pieces?” or they’re always getting your tunes mixed up with someone else’s, so you get requests for “Green Eyes” or “Frenesi” or “In The Mood.” And they get some very terse replies like “No,” or “He quit the business,” or “I’ll play that when I get to the big band in the sky.” It becomes a kind of standup routine. Certainly anyone has a right to ask for anything, but I can’t for the life of me think why I have to do those tunes.

–Woody Herman, 1976, from Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of its Makers.

Please adjourn to the exhibit in the right-hand column under the sign reading Doug’s Picks for the Rifftides staff’s latest recommendations. The Louis Armstrong book is a holdover because no one on the staff has had time to read a new book. Hey, it was the holidays.

Bill Crow writes from New York:

So sorry to hear of Floyd’s passing. When I returned to the Seattle area after 3 years in the Army, I met Floyd and Quincy and Gerald Brashear and Buddy Catlett and Kenny Kimball and Ray Charles. We played a lot together in the music annex of the University of Washington. I was a valve trombonist and Buddy Catlett was a good alto player. Neither of us had any idea of playing the bass at that time.
I loved Floyd’s playing and his sweet nature. He could have made a national name for himself. Certainly Quincy would have seen to that. But he preferred Seattle and his life there. RIP sweet Floyd.

Jim Wilke of Jazz After Hours also produces and hosts Jazz Northwest on KPLU, a Seattle-Tacoma radio station. Next Sunday, December 28, at 1 pm Pacific time, 4 pm Eastern, he will devote Jazz Northwest to memories of Floyd Standifer and to Floyd’s music. KPLU is at 88.5 on the FM dial. Or go here for streaming internet audio. The hour will include comments from musicians who worked closely with Standifer, among them Jay Thomas, Clarence Acox, Bill Anschell, Butch Nordall and Michael Brockman. The program will be available as a podcast at kplu.org following the broadcast.

From Seattle comes news that Floyd Standifer died Monday night. The trumpeter, saxophonist and vocalist went into the hospital in late December for treatment of a shoulder problem. Doctors discovered that his shoulder pain came from cancer that had spread to his lungs and liver, and that his circulation was defective. Two weeks following a leg amputation, his heart gave out. He was seventy-eight.

Standifer spent most of his career in the Pacific Northwest, but musicians everywhere–particularly trumpet players–knew of him. His Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra colleague and former trumpet student Jay Thomas said today, “Floyd was always, as far back as I can remember, Seattle’s pride and joy. As a lyrical trumpeter, on a good night he had few peers.”
In a December Rifftides piece about a recent Standifer concert, I mentioned his tour of duty in the trumpet section of the great Quincy Jones band of the late 1950s and early ’60s.

On the Quincy Jones DVD in the new Jazz Icons series, Standifer solos in the trumpet section with Clark Terry, Benny Bailey and Lennie Johnson. When Jones formed the band, he hired Floyd along with two more of Quincy’s Seattle pals, bassist Buddy Catlett and pianist Patti Bown.

After the premature end of the Jones band, Standifer returned to his place as a mainstay of Seattle’s music establishment, playing trumpet, flugelhorn and tenor saxophone, and singing. Thomas recalls the late saxophonist Freddie Greenwell–another Seattle musician respected in national jazz circles–saying that he considered Standifer one of the best singers in the country.

In that December piece, I alluded to the Northwest Jazz Workshop, a sort of musicians co-op to which Floyd and I belonged in the mid-1950s. I was eighteen, struggling to become a jazz player. In a rehearsal band that mixed professionals with strivers like me, I found myself seated in the trumpet section next to Floyd. My previous big band experience involved Sousa marches. Confronted with the third trumpet part in an arrangement of Shorty Rogers’ “Elaine’s Lullaby,” I was terrified. It contained sixteen bars of chord symbols and otherwise empty space–a solo for the third trumpet. I looked at the old man next to me. He was twenty-four, ancient to someone my age. Floyd saw the look in my eyes, put his hand on my knee and said, “Don’t think about it, just play.” When it came time to cross that sixteen-bar Mojave Desert, I just played. At the end of the run-through, Floyd gave me a big smile. I have no idea what was in the solo, whether it was adequate or a disaster, but I will never forget that smile. And it is most unlikely that I will forget Floyd.

For a summary of Floyd Standifer’s life and career, read this 2002 article by Jessica Davis in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A little research discloses that the man who did that brilliant dual-personality lip-synch performance to Charlie Parker’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Leap Frog” is named Jeremiah McDonald. He has other clips on YouTube, none of them based in jazz. Still, jazz listeners who dig Spike Jones (there are more of them than you might think) will get a nostalgic charge from McDonald’s treatment of this classic by Doodles Weaver, the Jones band’s all-purpose nut.
For more about Jeremiah McDonald, aka The Reverend Cornelius Blow, go here.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player. –Ornette Coleman
I am an improviser…I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised. –Joe Zawinul

George Cables played a concert at The Seasons performance hall the other night. It was the kind of evening his listeners have come to expect, flowing with the inventiveness, technical skill and joy that Cables has demonstrated in a four-decade career with Art Pepper, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard and Art Blakey–a few names from the long list of his colleagues. Cables, bassist Chuck Deardorf and drummer Don Kinney gave two stimulating trio sets in the acoustically blessed former sanctuary of The Seasons.

Not long after intermission, Cables glided into Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” without accompaniment. Alternating between strict tempo and the rhythmic give-and-take of rubato, he began erecting a monument. Now bringing all of his formidable technique into play, now easing the dynamics, he never abandoned Monk’s imperishable melody altogether. He surrounded it with lightning flashes, parted the clouds to flood the themes with sunlight, swooped and soared above, below and around the tune. Symphonic, operatic and funky, he brought in Monk dissonances, roistering Fats Waller cadences, supersonic Art Tatum runs and a touch or two of Cecil Taylor delirium. He went on building, gathering intensity for five minutes, six minutes, seven. It may have been longer; the distraction of looking at a watch was out of the question. Deardorf and Kinney were mesmerized along with the audience. When Cables eased out of his rapture into the earth-bound hominess of “Blue Monk” and nodded them in, it took a momentary effort of will for the sidemen to join him aboard the blues train.
Cables has recorded a similar approach to “‘Round Midnight” in the CD called A Letter to Dexter. It is a fine version. It is not the equal of what he did last Saturday night at The Seasons, when he created that rarest of musical experiences, a concert performance that remains in the mind, whole and alive.

If you follow the links at the ends of Rifftides items, you’ll know that the distinguished Toronto broadcaster Ted O’Reilly commented on the recent Rod Levitt item. In his restrained way, O’Reilly wrote, in part:

Wow, yeah! Rod Levitt. In the ’60s RCA Canada did not release those LPs in Canada, but John Norris was running the jazz department at the main Sam The Record Man store and astutely imported some US copies. I got them all for the radio station where I worked, and played the hell out of them all.

That prompted Mr. Jazzolog to respond with a comment of his own:

What a treat to run the names and sounds of both Rod Levitt and Ted O’Reilly through my head on the same page! One of the worst parts of moving from the Buffalo area down into the wilds of southeast Ohio a number of years ago was not hearing Ted’s wonderful radio show out of Toronto anymore. He’s the kind of DJ who segues from Jelly Roll Morton to the Art Ensemble of Chicago without batting an earplug. Great to see his comment! Now, how about someone reflecting on the work of Tom Talbert…whose last CDs I’m scrambling through the Net to find?

Someone did so a year-and-a-half ago, shortly after Talbert died. From the Rifftides archives:

An elegant, soft-spoken man, he was an early and drastically overlooked composer, arranger and band leader on the west coast before West Coast Jazz was a category…The recordings Talbert made shortly after World War Two sound fresh today. Art Pepper fell in love with Tom’s treatment of “Over the Rainbow” and adopted the song as his signature tune.

To read the whole thing, complete with leads to some of Tom Talbert’s recordings, go here.

Tenor saxophonist Mark Turner offers a heartfelt, forthright evaluation of Michael Brecker, including this:

I saw him put his horn on at clinics and soundchecks and–cold, without warming up–instantly play the most f——- incredible sh–, stuff that most saxophonists simply cannot deal with.

Okay, I cleaned it a little up for a family audience. To read all of Turner’s unexpurgated throughts about Brecker, go to The Bad Plus web log, Do The Math. Pianist Ethan Iverson writes most of the blog. It is worth frequent visits. I have added its link to Other Places in the right-hand column.

Trumpeter Randy Sandke knew Michael Brecker for nearly forty years, since both were college freshmen. Thought by many to be the most influential saxophonist since John Coltrane, Brecker died on Saturday, January 13, of leukemia brought on by myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a rare cancer of the blood marrow. After saying his final goodbye to Brecker, Sandke wrote the following remembrance of his friend. We are honored that he chose Rifftides to publish it.

Michael Brecker as I Knew Him
By Randy Sandke
I’ve already been to too many memorial services for jazz musicians (and I know I’ll be at many more), but of all of them, the one for Michael Brecker was the saddest and most emotional, at least for me. Maybe it was because he had two beautiful school-aged children: a daughter age seventeen named Jessica and a son, Sam, thirteen. Then there were the circumstances of his death–a grueling two-and-a-half year struggle with an ailment for which there is no cure, and for which the therapy (massive chemotherapy) was often as devastating as the disease. But lastly, there was Mike. Aside from his prodigious and unique talents, he was one of the sweetest, most gentle, and kindest souls I’ve ever met. His loss is incalculable in many ways.

I’ve know Mike since we were both eighteen, students at Indiana University. He entered as a Spanish major and took music courses only as electives. Even then he was a stupendous player. He idolized his older brother, Randy, who had graduated from Indiana two years before. Mike thought he could only catch up with Randy (who was and is a well-schooled but very natural trumpet player) by working as hard as he could. He was obsessed with practicing. He and Steve Grossman (whom I think Mike had met at Phil Woods’ camp, Ramblerni) used to compete by seeing how fast they could transcribe the latest Coltrane recording. Mike once told me he wanted to be Coltrane, though he listened to many other tenor players, from Joe Henderson and Joe Farrell to Junior Walker and King Curtis. (We used to assemble at a campus pizza parlor and listen to “Memphis Soul Stew” on a nearly nightly basis).
But Mike had a musical Achilles’ heel: he found reading music boring and at that time was barely able to do it at all. He auditioned for the IU jazz band but because of his reading difficulties only made the second band. I remember hearing a concert they performed in which Mike sat patiently in the section as they ran through their not too inspiring charts. Suddenly Mike stood up and blew the roof off the place. He then sat back down as if nothing unusual had happened and finished the concert. Even then he was hypercritical of his own playing.
We formed a jazz-rock band with the rather uncouth name of “Mrs. Seamon’s Sound Band.” Mrs. Seamon was the head dietician at Wilkie Quad where Mike and I lived, and she hated the longhaired and unkempt students who were invading her cafeteria. Mike himself was always something of a natty dresser but we were all letting our hair grow long; after all, this was 1967-8.
Our band played at the Notre Dame collegiate jazz festival that spring and our mélange of straight-ahead cum avant-garde cum fusion totally baffled the judges. Ray Brown refused to give us the first prize, so for the first time in the history of the festival they didn’t award one. We all considered this a major victory; the hippie side of us looked askance at competitions anyway.

Young Michael Brecker
But out of this came an offer to take the band to Chicago (my hometown–Mike was from Philly) to be managed by the wife of a Chicago jazz writer. This whole episode was a disaster from the start as it turned out that she was more interested in maintaining a stable of young studs than taking care of business. When two of the band members quit, we were stuck in a semi-hopeless situation. She’d already put us up in an apartment and invested money and we felt obligated to her but couldn’t work until we replaced the guys who left. We tried auditioning various musicians but none jelled with what we were doing.
After two months of this stalemate I couldn’t take it anymore. I went home to my parents’ place to enjoy a warm meal and clean sheets. I told everybody I’d be back in a day or two. That night all hell broke loose. Two sisters, friends of the keyboard player, were “crashing” with us. One was selling LSD and she handed it out that night. Everyone in the band had some experience with it (and I’m pretty sure some declined), but the younger sister, Bridget, had never taken it before. She was very attracted to our drummer, Eric, as was another woman who was staying with the band. Between the acid and this bizarre love triangle Bridget got so upset that she flung herself out of a third story window and killed herself.
An ambulance took Bridget away but the others were rounded up by the police as the apartment was searched. They found the LSD and everybody was carted off to Cook County Jail. Michael and I were the only two not arrested. Earlier that evening Mike had sensed that something might go terribly wrong and he went out for a walk. He returned to find the place surrounded by police cars and paddy wagons. I never found out where Mike stayed that night. He may have just paced around until dawn.
For the other band members, the nightmare only deepened. They were separated and put into cells with vicious criminals. Eric, who had witnessed Bridget’s jump and also taken acid, was brutally gang raped in his cell. Meanwhile, the notoriously corrupt Chicago police sent a van to our apartment and proceeded to steal all the band’s equipment and possessions. I lost my record collection, my trumpet and the flugelhorn I’d won at Notre Dame. Once again Mike was spared the worst because he had taken his tenor into a shop for repairs.
An ambitious DA wanted to press murder charges against the guys and the press was hungering for a sensational LSD story. Eventually the whole thing was thrown out on a technicality, but too much damage had already been done. Eric was never the same. Within a year he committed suicide by jumping off a landing in Los Angeles.
Mike and I were both devastated, but we dealt with this horrible experience in very different ways. I was having trouble with a rupture in my larynx that was exacerbated by playing without proper amplification in our band. After an operation I considered unsuccessful I decided to quite the trumpet and music altogether. I didn’t even own a trumpet for another ten years. I sought treatment with a variety of psychiatrists, learned to live without being a musician, and gradually came to terms with all that had happened.
Mike moved to New York where his brother was already well on his way to establishing himself as a jazz and studio player. At nineteen Mike made his recording debut on his brother’s record, “Score.” From there they both proceeded to garner more and more success and fame.

The Brecker Brothers
Yet, I know that the events of the summer of ’68 were still gnawing at Mike’s soul. He was a very shy, introverted person. Like many musicians he was more comfortable in the privacy of his practice room than in the company of people, especially strangers. Suddenly, he was in the limelight, surrounded by crowds of admirers and offered vast quantities of every conceivable temptation known to man.
I think it was in an effort to retreat from our bad experiences in Chicago that Mike began a downward spiral into alcohol, cocaine and eventually heroin. Through the seventies Mike’s fame grew by leaps and bounds as his private life deteriorated. This was also the period when he and Randy invested in their nightclub, Seventh Avenue South. It was a big success with audiences but an unscrupulous manager stole money and didn’t report anything to the government. Mike was financially wiped out as his bank account was seized by the IRS three times.
Finally, he came around and sought treatment and was able to transform his life. He took himself out of circulation for at least six months. He told me he didn’t care if ever made a penny again, he was going to do what he wanted to. He met the love of his life, Susan, and they settled down in a secluded home in Hastings-On- Hudson (before, Mike had lived in spacious but dingy lofts in the West 20’s and on Grand Street near Chinatown). Mike became a family man who doted on his two kids. He said if he had it to do again he would have had more. The family pet, a seeing-eye dog who hadn’t made the grade, rounded out the picture of suburban bliss.
I was really happy for him. After his hiatus Mike’s career again resumed as if he’d never been gone. It just exploded all over again, as well it should have. If a jazz musician becomes a major success, the critics can cool off on you and take you for granted. But no one, at any time, ever played the tenor the way Mike did. In live performance, he was probably the most exciting musician (jazz or otherwise) I have ever heard.
I started playing again in late 1979. By ’85 I felt ready to make my first solo album. I asked Mike to be on it. He was his usual gracious and encouraging self, and a model of professionalism in the studio. We did another album ten years later when I was with Concord.

I felt that Mike should not give me any special breaks and negotiated his fee with his manager and good friend, Daryl Pitt. I knew it was above Concord’s budget so I made up the shortfall out of my own pocket and sent a check to Mike. He never cashed it.
The real tragedy of Mike’s final illness is that everything was working so well for him- and he’d learned to appreciate it all. He also learned how to deal with his fame in a positive way and very seriously regarded his job as being a role model for saxophonists everywhere.
He also used his fame to raise awareness for his disease. Because of publicity he generated, 10,000 people from all over the world were tested as donors for bone marrow transplants. One of the few bright spots for Mike over the last few weeks was when he received a letter from a child whose life had been saved by a donor who had responded to the call to find a match for Mike. Michael himself never found a perfect match but did receive a transplant. The donor was his own daughter, Jessica. The doctors believe that her gift enabled Mike to live for an additional year.
One of the frustrating things about Mike was that it was impossible to compliment him without his complimenting you back. He wanted to see everybody as on his level, but the truth was, he existed on his own plane. Like all great artists, he gave us all a glimpse of how limitless and invigorating the possibilities of life are. Typical of his modesty was that (and I’m sure this was according to his wishes) the only music played at his memorial service was recordings of John Coltrane. The only live music was sung by a female cantor who did some ancient sounding Jewish modal piece that sounded eerily similar to something Coltrane would have played. Even in death, Mike was trying to teach us something about the universality of human experience.
Everybody who knew Mike loved him dearly and cherished every moment spent with him. He was extremely down to earth and totally unassuming. One of his favorite words was “amazing,” which of course he never applied to himself. He was a great spirit and, I truly believe, one of the greatest musical figures of our era. I feel so blessed to have known him and been able to call him my friend.